Synthesis and Constructive Alienation -
by Patricia Reed

13 November 2015

MORE INFORMATION

Patricia Reed is an artist and writer based in Berlin. She has
exhibited at the Witte de With, Netherlands; Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, Germany; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; and the
Württembergische Kunstverein, Germany. Reed’s texts have
been published in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader; The
Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Intangible Economies;
Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics; and Fillip. She has
given lectures at the ICA, London; IMA, Australia; the Montréal
Biennale, Canada; Tate Britain, London; Artists Space, USA; and MIT,
USA, among others. Reed hosts the Inclinations lecture series in Berlin
and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group.

To begin the task of constructing horizons untethered to the
ones already in our midst, such as increasing inequality, debt
enslavement, and encroaching climate change, it is arguable that we
must collectively learn to unroot or alienate ourselves from current
pragmatic and cognitive constraints. Rather than overcoming
alienation as a state of isolating disconnectedness, we learn to
embrace its force of displacement to experiment with other structures
of cohabitation. In this way, alienation is positioned as an affirmative
project: a freedom to construct new systems of collective life. This
talk will introduce a “synthetic” approach as a certain methodology
for alienation affording creative world-making without reverting to
top-down blueprint models of utopian schematics.